The Hunted

Review by Christopher Caile

Editor’s Note: FightingArts.com was invited to
preview this film and interview one of its primary actors, Oscar winner
Benicio Del Toro, as well as Tom Brown, Jr.,who not only was an inspiration
for the film, but acted as technical consultant.

Paramount Picture’s new psychological thriller, “The Hunted”,
is an intense, bloody and violent testosterone-pumping adventure-thriller
that falls short of its potential. This is not a film for the sensitive,
weak-stomached or faint hearted. But if you are a martial artist and
like up-close realistic hand-to-hand knife combat – and the film
must be praised for its knife fights -- you might just enjoy this film.

“The Hunted” stars Oscar winners Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio
Del Toro along with Connie Nielsen. The film was directed by Academy
Award and Golden Globe winner Billy Friedkin. The film is rated “R.”

This film seemed to be a combination remake of several films. First
is “The Fugitive” that featured a chase between a wrongfully-accused
prison escapee against the US Marshalls ordered to find him, headed by
a character also played Tommy Lee Jones.

A camouflaged Hallam (Del Toro),
a crazed Ninja-like killer melts through the forest

This plot is combined with the
ex-Green Beret protagonist with a featured knife as seen in “Rambo,” who
wages a one-man guerrilla war in the mountains. But in this movie the
Rambo-type figure is no hero – he has dropped over the mental edge
into his own haunted hell to become a demented killer.

Master tracker L.T. Bonham (Jones)
tracks his prodigy

The movie’s plot is potentially a good one. It is about a wilderness
tracker and retired Special Forces trainer, L.T. Bonham (Jones), who teams
up with the FBI, headed by special agent Abby Durrell (Connie Nielsen), to
hunt down the perpetrator of a series of grisly murders of hunters in the Pacific
Northwest. Jones soon recognizes signs that the killer is a former student,
a military special operation’s killer, Aaron Hallam, enigmatically
portrayed by Del Toro.

Both main characters are internally tormented. Bonham (Jones) is driven
by guilt over having trained military special-operations assassins, and
Aaron Hallam‘s (Del Toro) mind has been warped by the bloody butchery
he experienced. Early in the film, the Jones character, while teaching
Special Forces how to kill, says that once the mind can accept killing,
the physical part is easy. What’s not easy is turning it off. Del
Toro’s mind can’t turn it off.

The film opens in 1999 with Hallam (Del Toro), Jones’ student,
on a secret behind-the-lines operation during the bloodiest fighting
in Kosovo. It’s night. Buildings lay in ruins. Fire, explosions,
bombing from American bombs and constant gun fire on the ground are all
around. Against this fiery background Serbian soldiers are carrying out
atrocities against Albanian civilians. It’s a blood bath. Del Toro
silently slips through this carnage, past guards, into a make-shift headquarters
building to assassinate the Serbian officers who had ordered the butchery.

Hallam (Del Toro) is tormented by these memories. There are incessant
nightmares, and he goes AWOL. In some demented way he reverts to a path
that parallels his former teacher. Bonham (Jones) has become an agent
for the charitable WildLife Fund. Hallam too escapes into the wilderness
and becomes a protector of wildlife in his own way: he resents hi-tech
hunters and begins to hunt them down using only his senses, camouflage
and a knife – a knife that becomes a secondary character in the
film. His training assists him. He can magically disappear into the forest,
almost before one's very eyes, and then appear suddenly in violence.

Hallam’s brutal killings prompt the FBI to hire Bonham, who is
uniquely equipped to track and find this type of elusive killer. He is
convinced by gruesome pictures of the crime scene to come out of retirement.
Once on the scene, Bonham heads into the woods alone and soon recognizes
clues that point to his own protégé as the killer. Bonham
then begins to track Hallam alone across countryside and forests, both
men using their survival and tracking skills as Hallam constructs elaborate
booby traps to stop him.

Bonham’s (Jones) tracking is phenomenal, expertise reminiscent
of that portrayed in the film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” After
capture, Del Toro’s character makes an escape, the action moving
to an urban environment. The chase includes thrilling action, such as
a spectacular stunt from Portland’s interstate Bridge into the
waters of the Williamette River below. The fast-paced action leads toward
a climactic, bloody knife battle from which only one will emerge.

William Friedkin, the film’s director, was inspired to make the
movie after befriending Tom Brown, Jr., a wilderness tracker and survivalist
who trained Delta Force and Navy Seal forces. He taught real world, Ninja-type
expertise on how to use the environment, camouflage, and make way through
enemy territory invisibly and without a sound, like a shadow, to be aware
of danger and how to avoid it. The knife featured in the film was Brown’s
too, especially developed by him for wilderness survival and now produced
by a major knife manufacturer.

Friedkin says, “I was fascinated with the nature of the man (Brown)
who has these skills – he’s able to survive and kill – but
he’s never really used those skills in combat.”

Then Friedkin read a script by David and Peter Griffiths about a Delta
Force style assassin who became a serial killer. A film script was then
developed. Tom Brown was recruited to train the actors. Knife specialists
and Navy Seal trainers Thomas Kier and Rafael Kayanan also worked as
advisors to the film. Mark Stefanch, of Navy Seal Team 6, taught Jones
and Del Toro other aspects of military combat.

So far so good, but the film breaks down in its production. Friedkin
is known for exploring heroes divided against themselves, such as in “The
Exorcist” and “The French Connection.” But in this
film Friedkin seems himself divided. On one hand the film was inspired
by Tom Brown and his remarkable survivalist and tracking skills. It provides
a novel twist and much of the film’s publicity features this aspect.
Within the film, however, it’s as if Friedkin or his screen writers
lost nerve, for the action soon reverts from a wilderness setting to
the urban chase, mayhem, action, stunts and hand-to-hand combat.

The whole set up of the Hallam (Del Toro) character is thus wasted,
along with the tracker, survivalist theme. It was limited to the first
half hour of the film. The film could have been so much more. It should
have focused on aspects of survival, camouflage, tracking and counter-tracking
across the wilderness -- the hunter against the hunted where senses,
instinct and training are pitted against each other – using the
same test of nerves, action, and tension that supported “The Fugitive.” But
it didn’t happen. Yes, we see Del Toro in camouflage, melting into
the background. We see his ability to appear and attack as if from nowhere.
But these take second seat in the overall action, almost cameo in character.

Missing in action, too, was any depth of character development or exploration
of the inner conflict that drove both Bonham (Jones) and Hallam (Del
Toro). Friedkin tries to set this up in the introduction to the movie
and visually by presenting both characters independently of each other
in three non-verbal scenes. Their long term bond is sought to be established
with a single sentence: “Hey, L.T. (Bonham).” This doesn’t
work. The characters and relationships are never developed, so the audience
can not fully identify with them.

There is great visual imagery, but interplay of dialogue and personality
is wanting. With so little to sustain the film, perhaps this is the reason
that the action quickly moves to an urban environment, where stunts,
car chases and hand-to hand combat become primary. Time after time Harram
gets cornered but he continues to escape in stunt get-aways that strain
credulity.

The film must be complimented, however, for its realistic betrayal of
hand-to hand knife combat. The film does not use the typical Hollywood
stunts with flashy action. Instead Bonham (Jones) and Hallam (Del Toro)
use pragmatic Philippino knife fighting (Kali) skills -- knife thrusts,
parries and slices combined with grappling and body off-balancing. It
is upfront, close-in and brutal. Everyone bleeds.

Visually this is very powerful, but the person next to me viewing the
film actually hid from much of the action. She said afterwards, “I
just couldn’t look at that much violence.”

The realism that Friedkin so relentlessly brings to the military, FBI
agent and knife-fighting scenes seems to be forgotten in the rest of
the film. Some of the wilderness traps set for Jones, for example, are
unrealistic, as they would take too much time to build. In the urban
concrete environment, the ability of Del Toro’s character to vanish
also becomes more difficult to believe. Likewise, his finding time to
forge a new knife weapon out of rusted abandoned steel in the midst of
his urban pursuit begs reality. Would Bonham ever have been unarmed?

No doubt many viewers will forgive these lapses for the fast-paced action,
stunts and thrilling chase. And like the real life action the move portrays,
the film’s images, once seen, are hard to get out of your head.

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About the Reviewer:

Christopher Caile is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of FightingArts.com.
He has been a student of the martial arts for over 43 years. He first
started in judo. Then he added karate as a student of Phil Koeppel in
1959. Caile introduced karate to Finland in 1960 and then hitch-hiked
eastward. In Japan (1961) he studied under Mas Oyama and later in the
US became a Kyokushinkai Branch Chief. In 1976 he followed Kaicho Tadashi
Nakamura when he formed Seido karate and is now a 6th degree black belt
in that organization's honbu dojo. Other experience includes judo, aikido,
diato-ryu, kenjutsu, kobudo, Shinto Muso-ryu jodo, boxing and several
Chinese fighting arts including Praying mantis, Pak Mei (White Eyebrow)
and shuai chiao. He is also a student of Zen. A long-term student of
one branch of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Qigong, he is a personal
disciple of the qi gong master and teacher of acupuncture Dr. Zaiwen
Shen (M.D., Ph.D.) and is Vice-President of the DS International Chi
Medicine Association. He holds an M.A. in International Relations from
American University in Washington D.C. and has traveled extensively through
South and Southeast Asia. He frequently returns to Japan and Okinawa
to continue his studies in the martial arts, their history and tradition.
In his professional life he has been a businessman, newspaper journalist,
inventor and entrepreneur.